Ancient whale emerges bone by bone along Potomac River

By Stefanie Dazio, The Washington Post

Posted:
08/06/2013 11:44:48 PM PDT

Updated:
08/07/2013 11:45:11 AM PDT

This 15-million-year-old whale skull was recovered July 20 at Stratford Hall in Virginia. Officials at the Calvert Marine Museum say the skull is 6-feet long and the entire whale would have been at least 25-feet long. (Courtesy of the Calvert Marine Museum/)

To reach the 15-million-year-old whale, the paleontologists and their entourage hiked a quarter of mile Tuesday, trudging along the slim shoreline of the Potomac River which separates Maryland and Virginia and wading into knee-deep water not far from the birthplace of Robert E. Lee.

For more than five hours, they chipped away at clay covering the bones of the ancient goliath, which likely belong to an extinct baleen whale that would have been 25 feet long. Based on the cliffs where it was discovered in Stratford, Va., the whale lived during the Miocene Epoch, five million to 23 million years ago.

Daryl Domning, Howard University anatomy professor, and his daughter Charlotte Domning, prepare a fragment to be excavated from a cliff in Westmoreland County, in Stratford, Virginia, on August 6, 2013. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/)

"You're seeing stuff for the first time in 15 million years. You're seeing history be exposed," said John Nance, paleontology collections manager at the Calvert Marine Museum in Southern Maryland and a member of the team that made news by extracting a six-foot-long, 1,000-pound whale skull from the site last month.

They have been working here ever since mid-June, when a staff member at Stratford Hall, the ancestral home of the Lee family, spotted the whale skull poking out of the sandy cliffs while accompanying researchers on a pollen study.

On Tuesday, the group used pickaxes, shovels, screwdrivers, putty chisels, paper towels and plaster to find and then preserve the whale's ribs, vertebrae, tail bones and possibly a scapula. They will return Saturday to dig the bones out and take them to the Calvert museum, where they plan to reassemble as much of the skeleton as possible.

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The dig resembled a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. And the excitement was palpable. While shark teeth and dolphin fossils have been discovered in the area, the whale is the largest creature they've uncovered.

Kate Kistler, a 21-year-old rising senior at Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania and aspiring paleontologist, said it was fascinating to see an organism that lived millions of years ago uncovered in the cliffs.

"And I get to hold a piece of it," she said.

Donald Morgan wades along the Potomac River carrying a boatful of supplies as a team of experts work to excavate the skeleton of a prehistoric whale nearby. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/)

She and the others worked quietly, the pounding of the pickax into soft clay, shrieks of birds overhead and the river lapping at the beach breaking up the work between media interviews.

Donald Morgan, a 22-year-old rising senior at Towson University, and Jess Howard, a 20-year-old rising senior at the University of Maryland College Park, are two of Calvert's summer interns.

Morgan hopes to be a paleontologist, while Howard plans to study marine biology. Neither thought they would be working with whale bones, particularly the skull.

"I wasn't expecting to be able to work on anything this large," Morgan said. "Just seeing this animal almost come to life was pretty cool."

Stephen Godfrey, curator of paleontology at Calvert Marine Museum, shows off a section of baleen whale rib from the skeleton of a prehistoric whale discovered on the side of a cliff in Stratford, Va. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/)

He was obsessed with dinosaurs as a child and called this experience "finally getting to live the dream."

"Anything that involves going out and digging up bones is right up my alley," he added.

Daryl Domning, a paleontologist and human anatomy professor at Howard University, has been on numerous digs throughout the world. He wears a brimmed hat adorned with pins of countries — including Libya, Venezuela, Austria and France — that he has visited for his work on sea cows.

He was joined on this excavation by his 19-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Working together for the first time — Charlotte wants to be a horse veterinarian — they uncovered a nearly complete vertebra and several tailbones.

"Here, almost any time, you can find whole new kinds of animals that nobody has found before," Domning said.

For Stephen Godfrey, Calvert's curator of paleontology, the fossils tell a story.

"It's like forensic paleontology," he said. "We don't know yet what story this whale skull is going to tell us."

But the location of the bones does give away some secrets. The fossils were found close together, but not laid out head to tail. That means scavengers likely dined on the carcass and moved the bones around.

The blue-gray clay surrounding the fossils also indicates that the whale was at the bottom of the ocean when it died, rather than beached along the banks of what eventually became the Potomac River.

Rob Furey, a professor of integrated sciences at Harrisburg, brought four students and his 14-year-old daughter to the site for a field studies class.

"These are the kinds of things that underscore evolution," he said.

The group uncovered several clumps of fossils but was only able to cut one chunk out to take back to the Calvert museum.

They coated the others with wet paper towels and then strips of burlap dipped in plaster to create what's called a field jacket, mimicking the protection a cast affords a child's broken arm or leg.

"We've got a broken bone," Godfrey said. "We're putting on a cast."

As Domning and Godfrey poured leftover plaster on top of the casts to make a final layer before reburying the fossils in clay until Saturday, the others rinsed off their hands and tools in the river.

Then Domning ticked off the reasons why people decide to become paleontologists: to play in the mud, mold casts with plaster and dig holes in the ground.